


Digging Yourself Deeper

by Nagasha



Category: BomBARDed (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, MotA 2018, These Children Don't Know How To Talk To Each Other, march of the arts 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-07-01 02:13:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15764511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nagasha/pseuds/Nagasha
Summary: Three idiot friends try to make up for past mistakes, only end up hurting each other more because they can't talk to each other like functional adults.---Randy tells Yashee about the Portable Hole Prank, Yashee tries to vent some anger, Raz'ul tells the truth for once.





	Digging Yourself Deeper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rowan (@The Holy One)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Rowan++%28%40The+Holy+One%29).



Randy tried not to put too much value in the past. The past was over and done with, as far as he was concerned. Besides, if he started thinking about the past too hard, he’d never stop, since there was just… too much for one halfling to really handle. So, all that really mattered was the present, and for once, the present was good. He had a place to rest his head, enough food to keep even the hungriest halfling fed, and he had his Joby. Even more than that, he had a place to finally learn how to be a bard, and he had people to learn with.

It’s honestly the happiest he’s ever been since… well, that one thing that he doesn’t think about, and he knows he owes most of it to Yashee and Raz’ul (and maybe even Splash just a little, but that doesn’t count.) Randy isn’t used to having people he knows he can rely on and trust. It’s a little unsettling, at first, how quickly these two became so important to him, after so long with just him and his Joby. He’s run with people before, even after the Nowhere Man- just quick gigs of the musical or… less than musical variety, and he’s never reached this level of trust before.

They faced Rhiannon for him. They found out he was almost a Nowhere Man, and shrugged it off. They found out about Eddie, that he had a voice in his head that made him do horrible things, and they were worried for him instead of worried about him. They knew about Joby.

That was the biggest thing, in a way- they knew he was still holding onto his childhood teddy bear, and they didn’t care. More than that, they supported him- Yashee even helped him fix up Joby when they went to Belm. And… with them around, he didn’t feel afraid to bring Joby out into the open. There was no questioning about 'aren't you a bit too old for a teddy bear', or mocking him for holding onto something from his past. Even more than that, there was safety in numbers: hey’d protect him if anybody tried to destroy his bear, and being seen with a teddy bear is no weirder than sitting on each other’s shoulders, or turning into a horse to try and get into a secret teacher rave. When he was with Yashee and Raz’ul, it was okay to stand out because he knew they had his back.

The only thing was, did he have theirs?

It was one thing to be relied on in a fight, and Randy was good at that even when he couldn’t be trusted with anything else- he did good damage, could heal in a pinch, and he could even do magic even though Eddie’s been a bit… testy, lately. But outside of a fight?

Randy didn’t know the first thing about being a good friend- or a friend at all, for that matter. He was trying, and hopefully he was doing okay. He’s shared meals and jokes and long boring trips, he’s written songs and fought battles with them and for them. More than that, he told them about his problems and his secrets, even though sometimes it felt like spitting up bile. He didn’t tell them about not being able to read or why Joby is so important, but that’s okay too- as hard as it is to believe, he has time later for that. They have time for that, together.

But he doesn’t know their secrets, not like they know his, and it’s… a little grating. It probably is just that they’re completely honest, that Yashee came from a travelling bard and barbarian family and Raz’ul grew up in the woods learning how to Druid from an actual talking owl, but his paranoia said otherwise. And… that was okay, honestly- between Rhiannon and Eddie, the circumstances forced him to tell them about his past, and he doesn’t want that to happen to them. He wants them to tell him when they feel comfortable, not because their old coworker tried to kill them or the wizard in their stomach tried to kill said coworker.

So, he doesn’t know their secrets- unless he counted Yashee’s collection of spoons, which was weirder than it was secretive- but he did know their problems. As a group, they had a lot of them, ranging from Raz’ul constantly needing more potpourri ingredients to Randy’s fun little back tattoo of doom. But… there was one that was bothering Randy for a while.

He wasn’t a very empathetic person, and his sense of right and wrong was literally criminally underdeveloped. But he was pretty sure friends don’t trap friends in dark pits and act like it was closing over them. That was… probably pretty bad, and as funny as it was at the time, Randy does feel guilty- especially since now Yashee is scared of small dark spaces. And Raz’ul actually is a good person, one of the nicest people Randy knows, so if RANDY is feeling bad about it, then it has to be eating away at Raz’ul even more.

Randy has had a lot of experiences doing bad things- it may or may not have involved leaving somebody in a pit like that and not helping them back out- but he doesn’t know how to undo them. He vaguely remembers back before the Nowhere Man, when people still tried to teach him right and wrong, and he thinks he knows what the first step is.

He knocked on Yashee’s door. “Hey, Yashee?” 

“What’s up?”

“I… I have something to tell you.”

\-----------------

Barbarian rage is not a fickle thing, her mother warned her. Once you train to become a barbarian, you no longer have the luxury of anger without  
purpose. No matter what happens, you cannot let yourself feel anger when you do not have a target.

The problem was, Yashee had a target. He was standing right in front of her, not even moving out of the way, and the longer he stood there, the less the reasons why she can’t just punt him across the room mattered. It didn’t matter that he was her bandmate, her friend- if anything, that made it worse.

That moment with the portable hole was the worst moment of her life- Yashee had never felt so alone, so afraid, so… small, as she had then, and she never wants to feel that way again. But now she does, because Randy just dragged her back in there- and not for the first time.

Underneath the anger, there was fear. It felt like she was back in the void, back in the caves below Basom, only worse because back then, she knew she had people watching her back, people she could rely on. Only she didn’t, because her two best friends were the ones that put her in there.

She was crying- she was crying, and she was raging and still Randy stood there, looking up, looking scared, looking like the perfect thing to take her rage out on-

And then there was Raz’ul, awoken by the commotion, and just as worthy of her ire- even more so, because as much as Randy tried to sidestep it, even as he told her their sins, Raz’ul was the one who did it, the one who wanted to cage her in the first place. And now he was looking up at her, yawning and looking carefree and like her very best friend, and suddenly Yashee hated him, in a way she had never hated anybody ever before.

It was one thing to attack her, to try and kill her or eat her brains or use her for strange experiments. It was another thing to hurt her, to leave her scarred in a way she still has nightmares about closing holes and eternal darkness, and to pretend to have done nothing wrong. To pretend to be her friend, because…

“Friends don’t hurt friends, Raz’ul.” Yashee didn’t mean to say it aloud, and she didn’t mean to lift Raz’ul up and pin him to the wall. But she didn’t care, either. There was a part of her that knew she would care later, and it was the same part of her that knew her anger was burning so hot it froze over, and that this type of cold fury was dangerous. But Yashee didn’t care about that, not right now.

Right now, that part of her was locked into a deep dark pit of her own, and right now she was holding Raz’ul up by the throat and looking right into his eyes. He was scared, and he should be, because of how scared he made her feel. “Y-Yashee, what’s- don’t tell me you have your own Eddie!”

She didn’t know if it was a joke or not, and she didn’t care. “Randy told me about the portable hole.”

“The portable… oh!” The fact that it took him a few minutes to remember was just fuel for her fire, even if he suddenly seemed contrite. “Yeah, that…”

“Yes, ‘that’.” Yashee’s grip tightened, and she didn’t even realize until Raz’ul started gasping. She let up, just enough. 

“Look, I’m- I’m sorry, it was a dumb joke- Randy and I didn’t know it would hurt you, we just thought… we didn’t think,” and Raz’ul just kept talking, and the more he spoke, the less his words meant.

This… seeing Raz’ul like this, seeing the person who hurt her like this, it wasn’t helping, not like she thought it would. It didn’t make her feel like she was stronger than her fears, it didn’t help her feel in control. It made her feel like a bully, not like she was getting back at somebody who hurt her.

Her rage was fading, and her rationality was returning back to her- what was she doing? This was… this was Raz’ul. He was the one that hurt her, he and Randy both, but… he was also her friend.

Yashee didn’t have too many friends, not enough that she could risk losing the ones she has- even if they hurt her before. That didn’t mean she could hurt them now, or even that scaring Raz’ul like this was okay. (Even if a part of her said she should keep going, that she should still hurt him like he hurt her, that he deserved to suffer- there was enough of her now to know that she can’t do that, she can’t attack her bandmates even if they hurt her and made her feel afraid.)

Yashee let Raz’ul go rather than put him down gently, since rage aside, she was still pretty upset with him and Randy for what they did to her. Honestly, if they wanted to stay friends, the three of them were going to have to have a long talk about-

All Yashee heard was the sound of an organ, and Randy’s voice- it took a while to place, because it was him singing, but he had never sounded so afraid when he sang before, not even in the void or when they fought Rhiannon- from behind her, and then she was frozen in place.

She watched, helplessly, as Randy ran out from behind her with a fully packed bag on his back- did he pack that so quickly, or did he always have it ready?- to help Raz’ul up, and hurry him out of the room. She watched as they scurried away, and while her friends have always been tinier, this was honestly the first time she thought of either of them as small. There was panic in their eyes as they ran off, and for a second Yashee could see the beginning of bruises around Raz’ul’s neck.

Then, they were gone, and Randy’s Hold Person spell lost hold. Yashee collapsed to the ground like a puppet without strings, not held up by Randy’s spell or her own rage. She was exhausted, by the aftershocks of the events she had just gone through, and how deeply the whole thing cut.

Their dorm room was pretty big, and they had left all the lights on. And yet… she still felt like she was trapped at the bottom of the hole. Only this time, she knew damn well who put her there.

\------------------------

Raz’ul hasn’t seen hide or hair of Yashee or Randy recently, and he couldn’t blame them. He tried, at first, because he didn’t want to be responsible for this- but every time he tried to shift it, the sentiment rang hollow like a broken bell.

‘If only Randy didn’t tell her.’ And what, they would just… never let her know what happened? Leave Yashee looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life as they shoulder the guilt for that dumb joke gone horribly wrong? That was the trajectory they were going on, and eventually one of them would have broken.

‘If only Yashee didn’t Rage when she found out.’ Like it would have been anything else. Like there was some other way she could have possibly reacted to this mess that wasn’t pure anger and rage. Honestly, Raz’ul was lucky that Randy had prepared Hold Person and was able to stop her from doing anything worse than bruises. Honestly, Raz’ul deserved far more than that.

‘If only they told Yashee straight away.’ It seemed nice, and Raz’ul found himself stuck there for a while. Only… only if they did that, if they let her know then and there, then she never would have given them the chance to become friends, and somehow that seemed worse than all the rest of it.

The only If Only that actually rang true was this: If only I had never trapped her in the hole. It would have been so easy to just… not do it, and Raz’ul couldn’t stop kicking himself over it ever since the incident itself.

It’s just… it was an old dwarven prank- or at least one between him and his brothers- and one he fell into (sometimes literally) a dozen times in his childhood. He’d fall or get tricked into a hole, one of his brothers would leave him down there in the dark for a few hours, and then they’d come get him later. Honestly, the scariest part was getting in trouble for missing out on his responsibilities.

He didn’t realize, then, how scary it would be if you weren’t used to it. He was just thinking of his brothers back home, and how much trouble they caused him, and how he honestly missed them all, in spite of everything.

But that didn’t excuse anything, and there was no way he could go up to Yashee and explain ‘I wasn’t trying to be mean when I did that, I was just homesick’, because that’s not what people do when they miss home. They write letters, or try and remember the good times they’d had- not trap their bandmates in portable holes as a joke.

He expected Yashee to avoid him- it was a blessing and a curse that she refused to look at him, let alone talk to him- but at least she was still staying in their dorm. And he saw her with Tabitha once or twice, although the look on Tabitha’s sweet face when she saw him was somehow even worse than that time she was possessed. But at least Yashee was with a friend?

Randy, on the other hand… Raz’ul had no idea what Randy was doing. When he left, he left with a bag full of supplies (and Joby), and hadn’t returned to their dorm ever since. If it wasn’t for seeing Randy in classes, Raz’ul would have assumed the halfling fled the school to avoid Yashee’s wrath.

He’d be lying if he said he didn’t think about it- about writing Yashee and Randy a letter to apologize for what he did, and then leaving. What happened wasn’t Randy’s fault- he may have encouraged Raz’ul, but he also had an evil wizard in his stomach that probably told him to do it- and he was the one who told her. Yashee and Randy can heal from this mess, maybe even grow stronger as friends and learn from it. But not with him here.  
He could make it a clean break, here and now- it wouldn’t be the first life he left behind, or even the second. But he just… there was nowhere for him to go next, if he left. He couldn’t make it as a prince, or a druid, and it wasn’t leaving Strumlotts that would leave him a failure of a bard- it would be leaving his friends.

So, selfishly, he stayed. Raz’ul ended up reaching a compromise with himself- he’d stay until somebody, Yashee or Randy or even Splash, asked him to leave. He didn’t think they would, if he was being honest, but he wouldn’t have expected Randy to tell Yashee, and Yashee sure didn’t think her two best friends would throw her down a hole. Raz’ul kept a bag packed, just in case.

The three existed in this uneasy, silent truce for a week, before receiving word of practice scheduled for them that afternoon. It was unsettling, considering that none of them would have signed up for it, and the idea of playing together made Raz’ul’s stomach recoil. What sort of ensemble magic might leak out if they played, torn and twisted as they were?

Still, he went because he had to, and because he can’t keep avoiding his bandmates. If he felt extra on edge when he entered the room, like he was suddenly on pins and needles, that was probably why.

Splash was a surprise, honestly. He never really showed up to any of their practices before, and honestly Raz’ul had been so caught in worrying about his teammates, he forgot about their teacher. But here he was, sitting across from them and looking more tired than Raz’ul had ever seen him look. 

“I know I’m not the best teacher,” Splash started with a sigh, and that was never a good sign. “But would it kill you to come to me when you have problems, just once?”

“I don’t know how to trust you,” Randy said, and then visibly froze, hand to his mouth. “Why did I say that?”

Suddenly, that tingling feeling when he entered the room made more sense. “You cast Zone of Truth, didn’t you?”

“Did I have a choice?” Splash asked. “Would you have told me what was going on otherwise?”

“Of course not,” it slipped far too easily off his tongue, and immediately Raz’ul panicked, thinking of all his secrets. He had too much he needed to hide, and if he told them all right now, there would be no way they’d accept him and all his baggage.

“That’s two down…” Splash looked over at Yashee. “When was the last time you wrote in your journal?”

“Last night,” and Raz’ul almost thought Yashee escaped the spell when she continued, “I’ve been having a lot of problems with my anger after what happened, and the writing helps- Tabitha suggested it.”

“Okay, that’s a good place to start… What happened?” Splash asked, looking at all three of them as he spoke. “You three used to be so close, and now it's like you all suddenly hate each other.”

Raz’ul started to talk, to try and explain what happened and what he did, only to have his voice overlap with Yashee and Randy as they gave their own explanations. Splash listened for a few minutes before stopping them.

“I… think I understand, but let’s just get this clear.” Rubbing his face with one hand, Splash pointed the other at Raz’ul. “You pushed Yashee in a hole?”

“Well, uh…” Raz’ul didn’t look at Yashee as he spoke. “This was in Silk Grove, after we fought Wesley. Yashee was exploring the portable pit, and I… closed it on her.”

“We closed it on her,” Randy was quick to point out, far quicker than Raz’ul expected. “I- it wasn’t just Raz’ul, it was me too.”

“No, it’s fine, I know it was Eddie-“

“It wasn’t Eddie,” Randy bit out. “It was me. Sometimes I do awful things without prompting because I’m an awful person. Even why I try and fix things, I just make things worse because that’s all I can do!”

There was… that was a lot all at once, and Raz’ul had to wonder how long that was bubbling away inside Randy. It had to have been longer than a week- thoughts like that don’t just happen, after all. How long was Randy dealing with this?

“That’s… that’s a lot to unpack, Randy,” Splash looked just as shocked as Raz’ul felt, although he schooled his features down quickly. “I think we should probably talk about that later, but for now… you two stuck Yashee in your portable hole and closed it on her.”

“It was, uh… it was really scary,” Yashee stated, and Raz’ul looked over at her. She was standing tall, hands clenched into fists as she stared straight towards Splash. Raz’ul could only tell she was upset by the way her fists trembled and her shoulders shook. “I… I think they meant it as a prank, but… but I didn’t know what happened. I thought I going to be trapped down there forever…”

“Yashee…” Raz’ul stopped. He didn’t know what he could say to make things right. There probably wasn’t anything he could say to make things right. But still… “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I should have told you what happened as soon as we pulled you out.”

“I shouldn’t have told you,” Randy said, almost too low to hear. “If I didn’t tell you, then-”

“Then what? Then you two would have kept this from me for the rest of our lives? Or until some other creepy squid monster comes along and pulled it out of your brains to try and break us apart?!” Yashee crossed her arms as she looked down at Randy. “I was going to find out eventually, guys. I’m dumb, but I’m not that dumb…”

“You aren’t dumb!” Randy protested. “I’m the dumb one, I can’t even-“

He slapped his hand over his mouth just in time to stop himself from saying… something. Raz’ul wasn’t sure what, but he knew that neither of them was as stupid as they thought they were. They were good people, and better friends- he was the lousy one. 

It wasn’t until they both looked back at him that he realized he said it aloud. “Raz’ul, you’re…”

“I’m what?” He looked over at Yashee. “You two are the first real friends I’ve ever had, and-“

Raz’ul bit down on his fist to keep from talking, but Yashee’s expression began to soften and Randy’s cheeks were going a soft red. “Uh, what?”

“Me too,” Randy admitted, not able to meet Raz’ul’s eyes. Yashee’s expression went softer still.

“I… I’m afraid of hurting you.” She was quiet, and that was wrong, because Yashee should never be quiet. “When I found out, I… I wanted to hurt you two. I did hurt you.”

Subconsciously, Raz’ul touched his neck. The bruises had faded, but the memory of Yashee lifted him up by the throat hadn’t. He wanted to tell her it was alright, but he couldn’t. Instead, he settled for “we hurt you first.”

“You guys didn’t mean to. I did.” There was something dark in Yashee’s eyes as she spoke, and Raz’ul was pretty sure it wasn’t related to rage. “I wanted to hurt you like you hurt me. I… I don’t want you to hurt anymore.”

“I never wanted you to get hurt,” Raz’ul said, and it came out easier than anything else he said here. It felt like redemption, a little like it was going to be okay.

“I did, but… I don’t anymore?” Randy said with a wince. “I didn’t- I didn’t know you then like I know you now and… I’m not a good person, but I’m trying to be better.”

Yashee took a big, long look at the two of them, and then slowly she said “I can’t forgive you right now.”

Raz’ul slumped. He should have known, and yet… “Yashee, I…”

“Can you guys just… listen?” Yashee asked, hands on her hips and looking like herself for the first time since Raz'ul saw her crying. “I can’t… I can’t forgive you guys right away, because you guys were kinda being awful. For the hole, and for just letting me think it was some sort of accident for so long. But… I will forgive you eventually? Because we’re friends, and we’re gonna keep being friends for a long time. Got it?"

Raz’ul nodded, a soft smile on his face. Randy just gave a thumbs up, and then they were swept up into a giant hug as Yashee lifted them off the ground in a huge embrace.

Behind them, Raz’ul could hear Splash grumbling about pranks and detention and an early retirement, but Raz’ul didn’t care- all was right, and he was home.


End file.
